A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Obsession struck these past few days. I have been delving into Indiana history. I have not been doing much else than writing and researching; it left me a bit tired. I did the group thing on Friday, a little grocery shopping; Saturday, I hit the convenience store; Sunday was church; Monday, a visit to Walmart; and this morning was church, again.
I did work on a new section for the project after church, and I napped for around 4 hours. I tired some fried sardines in spaghetti sauce. Not bad, but I wish I had some peppers to balance the fish a little better.
Now, I am finishing up this post.
I sent “After Making Landfall” to Ploughshares and to Ex-Puritan, and “Plain Tales from the Flatlands” (what I had been shopping around as “Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town”) went to Black Lawrence Press. “The Unintended Consequences of Art” was sent to NewMyths.
Thank you so much for trusting us with your submission, Coming Home.
While your piece isn’t quite right for Marrow at this time, we wish you
the best of luck in placing it elsewhere, and we hope you’ll keep
writing.
Best,
The Editors
Same story was rejected on 6/1:
Thank you for submitting to Flash Frog and allowing us to read your work. Unfortunately, “Saved by Rock and Roll” is not a right fit for us. We wish you the best of luck in finding a good home for it and sincerely appreciate your interest and support.
Some videos from the past few days I want to pass along.
A Hoosier you've probably never heard of: John Hay. A very important man.
Indiana is not all corn: A lecture on The Maltese Falcon: And one about Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I agree with one fellow that Tortilla Flats is better. That Steinbeck does not get respect may be because of books like this, but then why is Hemingway not excorciated about To Have and To Have Not? I am never sure who I enjoy reading more, Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My solution has been to keep rading both.
Marie Kawthar Daouda, author of Not Your Victim: How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, speaks to EI’s Alastair Benn about the historical illiteracy of attempts to ‘decolonise’ Western culture. Instead, she argues that the moral complexities of history must be accepted in order to develop a genuine appreciation of the Western tradition.
When was it we started railing against Dead White Men in the Literary Canon? Thirty years ago, even more? As a non-dead white man, I ought to have been more annoyed. Instead, I went looking for those who may have been excluded. I found Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Junot Diaz, and Ralph Ellison; I had already been exposed to Richard Wright and Edith Wharton. Then there were foreign writers I knew of but did not read until I had passed my fiftieth birthday: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alasdair Gray, and Milan Kundera (to give an abbreviated list). I would add these to the canon for these reasons: they could write, and their works made us take a different view of what writing could do.
But history is complex on this issue and decolonization. Writers cannot be influential if they are not read, and to be read requires publication. Obscure writers may have qualities that we should recognize, but they have created the framework for literature upon which we labor. At best, these non-canonical writers can give us the means to diverge from the canon and to criticize the canon.
Colonization was bad, but its effects are complex. I write that with cinnamon in my spice rack and tomatoes on my shelf. It is also a lesson in the narrow-mindedness of human beings - how ostensibly Christian nations broke the Golden Rule searching for profits.
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 10/14/2025]
With having read so little Joyce Carol Oates, I think you might question the effect she has on me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Hardy have also hit me as hard. She makes me wish I'd kept writing fiction — as does all the other three. At the same time, Oates makes me wonder if I can ever write as well as she does — like Marquez. Her tales of western New York surprise and encourage me. Surprising me by setting them not in the more glamorous cities, like Jonathan Franzen. But small towns like Hardy and William Faulkner. Encouraging me with my own stories of no — where Indiana. She chills how she handles the most horrible of events (here: the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl) without flinching or overplaying the event in melodrama. Is this not Art? Is not this steadiness to be found in Oedipus Rex and Anna Karenina? Surprisingly, the prison's leisure library has more of her books (three, I seem to recall). I put them on the next reading list.
While reading We Were The Mulvaneys (Plume, 1997), I thought of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. There the gets raped, mutilated, and murdered; father executes his revenge. Therein lies the tragedy. In Oates' novel, the father cannot execute his revenge; society protects the rapist. The father and sons dwindle through impotence. The daughter, sent away, becomes figuratively mutilated and somewhat dead. The family splinters. Only when the father dies — away from the family but after reconciling with his daughter — does the family begin to heal. I see now what We Were The Mulvaneys shares with Franzen's The Corrections is the changing role and ineffectiveness of the American patriarch and the family. Oates has in her novel characters in some state of healing. Not a “Hollywood ending” but a hopeful one.
Tough, serious-minded, and the hardest novel I've read for a while. Oates made me think too much of my own life, my own family. I am actually looking forward to War and Peace.
Why is there not the same touting of Joyce Carol Oates for the Nobel as there is for Philip Roth?
I want to leave with a sample of Oates' writing. The problem is one of selection — length, its durability as a quotation, are troublesome here. She packs tightly.
So in the end Mike did walk his ravaged old rubbery-legged dad up the filth-encrusted stairs to the furnished room above the Golden Pavilion Chinese Pavilion and Takeout. The pigsty room you wouldn't want to examine too closely. Poor Mike biting his lower lip, nostrils pinching. He pulled off his dad's laceless shoes, a few items of dirt-stiffened clothing, laid him onto the stained rumpled sheets where at once he began to snore, snort, wheeze, his head lolling like the head of a broken-necked goose. Waking a long time later to discover only six twenty-dollar bills stuffed in his pants pocket — a hundred twenty when he'd had a wild hope of five hundred at least. So the ravaged old man had humbled himself in the eyes of his eldest son and in his own eyes for so little, after all.
sch
[Checking out the internet for the information denied me in prison, I found the following items.
I could write more about what happens, but I can’t be bothered to, which sounds dreadful, but that’s how the book made me feel by the end. There was so much detail, so many interwoven stories…and it was all rather unbelievable. While there are precursors to what happens in the pasts of Corinne and Michael, from the way they are described at the beginning, their actions are just not convincing for their characters. I didn’t believe that the people they were described as being would possibly act in that way. Judd is a rather weak narrator; Oates doesn’t seem quite sure what she’s doing with him, and digs into the minds and hearts of other characters in a way Judd could not possibly have done. How could he know in minute and graphic detail, what his brother was feeling or thinking at a particular time, for example?
On top of that, it’s a heavy book, with allegorical and Biblical overtones; the setting in Mt Ephraim is, I’m sure, deliberate, and the failures of fathers and betrayals of sons and so on and so forth, as well as the frequent mentions of religion and forgiveness and atonement etc, all gave it a weight that the flimsy story could not carry. It started out very promisingly, but it ran away with itself and became far too complicated and convoluted. The essential themes of the rupturing of the myth of the all American family; the questioning of the appearance of perfection; the ease at which families can be torn apart, by any number of seemingly trivial reasons that trigger a fault line already there, under the surface, are all excellent, and intriguing, and promised a great deal. Ultimately, however, I felt Oates tried to be too clever; to introduce too many strands; to say too much. The trite, twee ending was the final nail in the coffin. To give her due credit, her writing is wonderful, and I stayed with the book regardless of my doubts because her prose is so good, and drew me in despite the weakness of the tale she was spinning. As such, I haven’t been put off trying her again, as other reviews suggest this is not her best work, and I’m sure another one of her books might strike a better chord with me. Has anyone got any recommendations?
There are 41 comments, I scanned several, and they are interesting.
The old questions: “How good is Joyce Carol Oates?” and, given an oeuvre so vast, “Where can you begin to find out?” These questions have been reinvigorated in recent years. Oates’s reputation had always been precarious, marred by a critical suspicion of her copiousness and of her bestseller-adjacent tastes and interests. It seems to have crested in the 1980s and ’90s—that Toni Morrison usurped Oates’s Nobel Prize was the opinion of even one distinguished black novelist, Charles Johnson—and then to have waned in the 2000s. But in the last decade, and especially in the last few months, thanks to the controversial film of her Marilyn Monroe novel and to a sideline in Twitter shitposting almost as accomplished as that of the former president she so abhors, Oates has seemed to stand at the apex of her vanishing generation. After the deaths of Updike, Roth, Morrison, and Didion, and amid the more sibylline reticence of her remaining peers (Ozick, McCarthy, DeLillo, Pynchon), isn’t she the last lioness of American literature?
***
But this summary of male violence and female victimization makes the novel sound more agenda-driven than it is, when in fact it is less didactic than Roth’s book. In Oates’s fiction as on her notorious Twitter feed, we encounter an exoteric politics at odds with an esoteric aesthetics. She is officially a feminist, but her criticism hints that she finds the classic female domestic novel insipid, is bored by the enlightened domestics Austen and Eliot, and considers herself the heir to fanatic, fascistic Dostoevsky and Lawrence. As in Dostoevsky, her characters seethe and roil, actuated by unconscious manias and half-uttered desires; as in Lawrence, she sets the human drama in its natural frame, amid animal heat, stony cliffs, sucking bogs, killing winds, as if to say that we are a part of nature—of its hideous violence as of its pastoral beauty or poetic sublimity—and shouldn’t fool ourselves otherwise. One of Judd’s earliest visions is of a doe chased by a pack of hounds: rape rising right out of the earth.
***
Why, then, the controversy about whether or not she’s a good writer—even leaving aside the irrelevant question of how much she writes or of the popular-feminine genres she often favors? Bluntly put, the relevant problem is the prose. We find no fine writing, no will-to-style, no singular voice in Oates (neither in this book nor in any other work of hers that I’ve read): nothing like Updike’s lyric pointillism, Roth’s eloquent rage, Morrison’s scriptural orature, DeLillo’s mediatic staccato, McCarthy’s Biblical cadence, Didion’s knowing minimalism. Instead, there are clichés and imprecisions and redundancies, my favorite being an early reference to “animals and fowl,” as if the latter category were not included in the former. There are exclamation points, italics, interjections, sentence fragments, strangely-deployed quotation marks—all adding up to an urgent anti-style. I am ungenerously reminded of the apocryphal line about the similarly astylistic Dreiser: he had no talent, only genius. It is in retrospect bizarre—truly an instance of racial ideology—that anyone suspected the Swedish Academy of choosing Morrison over Oates for the 1993 Nobel Prize on the grounds of “political correctness” when I imagine that even a Swedish translation must convey which of the two writers is the exceptional stylist, the poet of prose.
Oates accomplishes her fiction’s very real emotional effect with sheer accretion and insistence; the novel is like the wind that batters High Point Farm, a constant unglamorous roar insinuating itself through the walls of your mind. Her major characters—in this novel, the fluttery and formidable Corinne, “Protestant to her fingertips,” is a particularly glorious creation—seem hacked with a claw hammer out of stone. This, too, is an inheritance of Dostoevsky and Lawrence, as well as of Charlotte Brontë, one of the few writers named in this impressively un-literary novel. I think it is a legitimate way to write fiction, if superficially less commanding than the line-by-line vigor of a Morrison. For these anti-poetic writers, the novelist uses language to surpass language, to strike through to the core of reality—psychological, natural, and spiritual reality—over which language decorously draws its ornamented veil.
I would not draw a comparison to Dreiser. There is a point here that I did not see ten years ago: the effects created by sheer accretion. But Oates works more nimbly than Dreiser — in my opinion, and you determine the worth of that. I like Dreiser — even though I fear his style adhering to my own. He lacks the cutthroat eye of Oates. Well, maybe not in An American Tragedy. This feels like quibbling, so I will go on.
Review: We Were the Mulvaneys (The Literary Omnivore, 2009) makes a point I had not seen elsewhere, one that I do not recall, but may need to be added here. I do recall one character's arc, the son, did seem dull.
Oates’ aggressively leisurely pace can drag at times, but it’s also useful for playing up suspense, mostly in the parts of the novel dealing with Marianne. It can be hard to care about Judd, our narrator, when the stories of the rest of his family are much more interesting–the lion’s share of his involvement in the main story is intertwined with Patrick’s story. Oates, like the best of mothers, devotes equal time to all the Mulvaneys. I will readily admit to flipping ahead to check where Marianne or Patrick were at any given point.
Did not really turn out that way. I have a pile of papers to go through in the morning. The first problem came when the PO called and let me know he was coming up. In a way, that lit a fire under me, who had actually slept in. I ran out to get new windshield wipers for a friend. Back here, I got the bedroom into shape.
The PO showed up. He let me know that with the budget cuts/government shutdown, I might have to start paying for my polygraph exams. Well, that might put that silliness into a new perspective. I found he fished; I had always thought him a hunter. The usual silly questions about pathological issues that do not exist. He arrived around 1 pm and left a half hour later.
While waiting for him to show up, I started on my email. Then I started putting together this post.
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I fear that I have avoided The Walrus, even before my current (supposed) embargo on politics, but I do read the newsletter sent and see what is being published. When I saw the link to The Case for Reading Quebec’s Most Reclusive Author, I clicked.
Over fifty years ago,
a young Québécois writer was staring at a small pile of rejection
letters. His clutch of manuscripts had been turned down by all of the
province’s publishing houses. They deemed his writing immature,
illegible, and too enamoured with breaking convention. So the
twenty-four-year-old tried a Hail Mary: he sent a manuscript to
Gallimard, the goliath of Parisian publishing responsible for the
careers of many of French literature’s great twentieth-century figures.
The gamble paid off. Gallimard would publish Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés in 1966, as well as three more titles in quick succession
***
By the time Ducharme died on August 21, nine days after his
seventy-sixth birthday, he was a myth. His nine novels, five plays, two
screenplays, and songwriting collaborations are part of Quebec’s
cultural psyche. Ducharme has earned “a place apart from the rest of
Québécois letters, on account of his work, on account of the mystery
that surrounded his life,” wrote La Presse book critic Josée
Lapointe, after Ducharme’s death. For the rest of Canada, he is still
very much a secret. His English Wikipedia page is exceedingly brief, all
of six sentences. His French one is longer, yet nowhere near the length
of his English Canadian counterparts, such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai
Richler, and Alice Munro. Yet as the winner of three Governor General’s
Literary Awards, a finalist for France’s Prix Goncourt, and an officer
of the Order of Canada since 2000, Ducharme is a French Canadian
institution, widely taught in the province’s college and university
curriculums.
***
It would be hard to
overstate Ducharme’s revolutionary effect on Quebec writing. According
to Annabelle Moreau, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Lettres québécoises,
Ducharme “created a literature for the province centered around our use
of the language, which by extension grew into our sense of culture and
national identity.”
From the article, I get the reasons for reading him; I suggest you read that argument.
What I took away from the article were other things: the transitory nature of literary fame; the obscurity imposed by our education of other cultures, other writers; and, finally, and far from least for me, that regionalism need not be the pejorative it is always taken to be.
We all live in a place. What we write about has its roots in our places. Why aren't Joyce, or Proust, or Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann, or Alasdair Gray, or Zadie Smith, or Charles Dickens, or José Saramago, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Mishima, or Amos Oz, or Orhan Pamuk, or John Steinbeck, or Chinua Achebe, or Naguib Mahfouz, or Milan Kundera not a regional writer?
The region we need worry more about is the limits we put on our imaginations - curbing our imaginations is the truly dangerous regionalism.
I have had George Saunders and Zadie Smith Talk with Deborah Treisman (The New Yorker) playing in the background. Two brilliant people, two great writers; plenty to learn about the process of writing, and about books. Yes, I have a crush on Zadie Smith, but the root of that crush is her writing and her thoughts on writing.
On the opposite end of my literary faves is Thomas Pynchon. He fascinates me because I am not as enamored of him as seems to be the norm for American critics. Richard Beck's Thomas Pynchon Is Angry (The Yale Review) uses the phrase "stoner humor" that might explain my finding Pynchon tiresome. I was never a stoner, never appreciated stoner humor for all the Cheech and Chong movies I've seen. However, Mr. Beck finally has me understanding how Pynchon is relevant to my own ideas.
The one thing
everyone knows about Thomas Pynchon’s novels is that they are paranoid.
We’ll get to that later. The other thing everyone knows about them is
that they are overstuffed. Packed with a manic variety of subplots,
original song lyrics, scientific arcana (both real and invented),
pop-cultural detritus, zany character names, and stoner jokes, Pynchon’s
books often feel as if they are on the verge of exploding under the
pressure of their own contents.
Yet if any one Pynchon novel can seem chaotic and ramshackle,
Pynchon’s body of work is among the most unified in postwar American
fiction: all of his novels deal with Americans’ inability or
unwillingness to understand the historical forces that built and
continue to shape the world they inhabit. This has been Pynchon’s great
subject from the beginning....
Thinking over the Pynchon novel's I have read - Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Against The Day - this does make sense.
Nor did I pay any attention to Pynchon's take on nostalgia being the same as mine - a variety of self-delusion:
This reverie, this “fantasy of old-time Milwaukee,” continues for quite a
bit longer. The first time I read it, I thought that Pynchon was
dragging on, that he had piled detail upon detail until the larger
picture collapsed under the weight of its constituent parts. The second
time I read it, I came to believe that it’s McTaggart’s longing that is
excessive, not Pynchon’s rendering of it. Remember what Pynchon wrote in
V.—that people situated at the bottom of history’s folds
console themselves with “a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what
they were.” That’s what McTaggart is doing here. The rosy urban
landscape McTaggart paints for himself in no way corresponds to the
Milwaukee that would actually be waiting for him back home, a city at
the economic nadir of the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce,
organized crime is running amok, and terror bombings are a regular
occurrence. Life in the U.S. may not be as grim as it is in Hungary, but
it is still pretty miserable. McTaggart’s nostalgia is not just
misplaced; he is lying to himself.
And complete agreement with America's dislike of history; albeit, I acquired this idea from Gore Vidal.
Pynchon isn’t just writing
about McTaggart here. Though his novels are filled with fantastical
hijinks and science-fictional elements, Pynchon is genuinely a writer of
historical fiction, one who has spent his life investigating how
certain historical moments came to be. What gives this project a
political valence is the fact that many Americans are—and always have
been—committed to remaining ignorant of the way their country’s wealth,
culture, and geopolitical strength were, and are, founded on violence
carried out in defense of capital accumulation and white supremacy.
Pynchon has previously written characters who could be duped or
bewildered by history without losing their author’s sympathies (Slothrop
in Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind), but in his depiction of
the blank stupidity that one finds just behind the screen of Hicks
McTaggart’s energetic charm, one detects a writer who has finally lost
patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious
consequences of their own country’s actions.
A stray thought, sparked by the following paragraph, concerned Dashiell Hammett:
When he says to Boynt Crosstown, his boss back at the PI offices, that
he can’t believe the feds would bring up the old days like that,
Crosstown’s response is scathing. “Of course they’re trying to turn
you,” he says. “Back to what you never stopped being. . . . You think
you’re reformed now. Not just a normal tough guy but a saintly one. . . .
But he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla
always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to.”
Talking to a mobster-turned-anarchist-bombmaker in the course of an
investigation, McTaggart says he wouldn’t be interested in going to
Italy, due to its being “a Fascist dictatorship.” “What makes you
private dicks any different?” the bombmaker replies. “Study your
history, gabadost,
you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as
Mussolini’s boys.” Even in Europe, McTaggart can’t find anyone who will
lend him a sympathetic ear. “Have you ever really looked at your
employment history?” an Interpol agent asks him. “One high-risk
orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s
greed or fear?”
The Pinkerton Detective Agency employed Hammett. They made big bucks breaking strikes; whether Hammett was a strikebreaker seems to be unclear. However, it is not unclear that Hammett's Red Harvest shows the after effects of strikebreaking and the costs of being ignorant about history. History is a record of humanity's character.
I still have a problem with the big slabs of books rampaging off into the wilds, the stoner humor mentioned above. That bias when combined with a fleeting comparison with Theodore Dreiser and the stoner humor comment made me spend a few seconds considering what Dreiser might have done if he smoked a few spliffs.
(Regarding Dreiser, I found these items: Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site and The mystery of Theodore Dreiser by Joseph Epstein, which opens with this:
I begin by borrowing a line from Theodore Dreiser, the master himself, before setting out to consider the first of many issues that Dreiser’s extraordinary career poses—that of the relationship of style to art. It was his friend and early champion H. L. Mencken who once remarked that Dreiser had “an incurable antipathy to the mot juste” but that ain’t the half of it. Theodore Dreiser also had an aluminum ear (one down from tin), an unfailing penchant for the purple, an oafish wit, and the literary tact and lightness of touch of a rhinoceros. Who but Dreiser, in Sister Carrie, could cap a brief description of workers returning home on a winter’s night in Chicago by saying that the crowd was “a spectacle of warm-blooded humanity”? Only Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, had the innate klutziness to write, “The death house of this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensibility and stupidity for which no one was primarily responsible.” No one except Dreiser, in The “Genius,” could roll off this squib of dialogue: “‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ laughed Suzanne.” For the gracious descriptive touch, there is this from The Bulwark: “Most of them were becomingly gowned in long frocks of every hue.” By now readers who have not read Dreiser and for whom style in literature is decisive are likely to join in the sentiment of Eugene Witla, the autobiographical hero of The “Genius”: “‘Nothing doing,’ he exclaimed, in the slang of the day.” But I would caution them, before giving up on Dreiser, with a line of snappy dialogue from Jennie Gerhardt: “‘Aw, you hush up,’ was her displeased rejoinder.”
But then it is a good deal easier to make fun of Theodore Dreiser’s prose style than it is to account for his genius. A genius he was, of that there ought not to be any serious doubt. He may not always have been able to write a careful sentence or a well-shaped paragraph, but this did not stand in the way of his turning out powerful novels. To put my cards on the table early in the game, let me say that Theodore Dreiser, in my opinion, is America’s greatest novelist. Herman Melville may have written the greatest single American novel, Henry James plumped deeper into the subtleties of human motivation, Mark Twain written more lyrically about this country, but Theodore Dreiser, that clod, bumbler, yokel, creep, wrote the novels that tell more in the way of elemental truth about American life and character, and tell it in a consistently persuasive and powerful manner, than those of any other American writer before or since his time.
***
The best students react well to the novels of Dreiser.
They sense that there are big things going on in his pages. And even the
very best students have the advantage that, at eighteen, they have very
little sense of prose style, and hence no snobbery about it. I am not
arguing for the superior wisdom of the young, but rather that the
shallow sophistication of the not-so-young can present its own
obstacles. Saul Bellow, who has long written and spoken admiringly of
Dreiser’s novels, puts the point best: “I often think the criticism of
Dreiser as a stylist at times betrays a resistance to the feelings he
causes readers to suffer. If they say he can’t write, they need not
experience these feelings.”
What are these feelings? I should say that any
comprehensive list of them would include humiliation and fear of
failure, the craving for respectability, every kind of longing, and the
desolation that accompanies an unutterable loneliness in the face of a
(probably) uncaring universe. In teaching Dreiser I have always wanted
to begin—perhaps some day I shall begin—by saying, “What you must
understand about Theodore Dreiser is that he was born poor and homely
and raised in ignorance and filled with desire. Write that down and
remember it. Now get out of here and go home and read the book again.”
I cannot say I ever approached Dreiser with joy, but in those two paragraphs I think is what makes Dreiser worth reading. Power. You go along with him, grumbling and even resisting a little, until you realize that he has grabbed hold of you, and you cannot go along with him to the end.)
Giorgio de Chirico is famous as a visual artist, but less well known is his prolific career as a writer. Considered the godfather of surrealism, his trajectory as an artist proved lastingly controversial.
It is hard to overstate the influence of his early artistic phase—of so-called metaphysical aesthetics—upon 20th-century modernism. In the early 20th century, we read again and again that the two pillars of modernism were on the one hand Picasso and on the other de Chirico. De Chirico was taken up and lionized and became in many ways the touchstone for surrealist paintings. The paintings of Magritte and Dalí, with which we’re so familiar, were essentially unthinkable without de Chirico’s figurative cityscapes, particularly deserted cityscapes, of which MoMA is the biggest owner in the world.
But other than the following section, I found little that struck my fancy:
SH: To respond super quickly to
de Chirico’s bilious and cantankerous bits, I want to mention that one
thing that is quite strikingly different between the two novels is the
structure of these screeds.
I’m so glad you mentioned the Memoirs because this gets at
another way he plays with form. In both novels de Chirico ends up making
what I find to be a documentary move. The documentary practice of
taking research materials or tangible language from elsewhere and
putting it into a creative text is super vibrant in poetry currently and
a pretty radical thing to do at the time. People often locate its roots
in 1930s leftist movements, with writers like Muriel Rukeyser and
Charles Reznikoff.
There’s a single moment like this in Hebdomeros where he drops in language from political posters. In Mr. Dudron,
he weaves his own writing with extensive quoting from an existing
19th-century tract on painting. The structure of the novel incorporates
this kind of external material, and I started noticing how when he does
this in Dudron the formal move is happening in the same moment
that he’s talking about material in visual art. He uses the documentary
move to highlight, in a different form, what he is critiquing about the
lack of materiality in painting. In both cases I think maybe he wants to
underscore the physical and tangible.
Some of the stuff he’s mad about is definitely bonkers, but some of
it is quite moving and convincing—like that people have moved away from
working with their hands and they’re not making their tools with their
hands and so they’ve lost a relationship with the materiality of that
which they make.
This feels echoed in the double voice you mention. He has this
interlocutor named Isabella Far which is also the name of his second
wife, or the name that he gave her, and he makes her a character in this
novel and he calls her “she of the philosophical spirit.” She’s the
greatest thinker about art and he places his own screeds in her mouth.
Dudron, who’s the autobiographical character is sitting around when
she walks in. He asks her questions, and she lectures him. Then, in real
life, in his 1945 essay collection Commedia dell’arte moderna,
he publishes some of these very same essays that are quoted in the
novel under her name, even though we now know that he wrote them.
YMMV.
I have not read enough of Thomas Mann, and Doctor Faustus is one of those i have not read. Ignorance of the novel does not mean I lack curiosity. Which is why why I spent time this afternoon with Jeffrey Meyers and his Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus’. The opening whetted my interest.
It’s unusual for an author to create a great novel and then, fearing
readers would not understand it, to write another book that explains
it. Thomas Mann’s The Genesis of a Novel (1949) describes how he composed Doctor Faustus (1947) and provides valuable insights into that difficult book. After working on Joseph and His Brothers for
16 years, the 69-year-old author finally completed that tetralogy in
January 1944. He first thought of finishing his early satiric novel Confessions of Felix Krull (1922), but decided to take up the challenge of writing the far more ambitious Faust novel.
***
The musical, military, pathological and political themes
magnificently merge at the end of the novel as the four stages of
Adrian’s disease—migraines, infection, remission and collapse—tragically
fuse with Germany’s predisposition to Reformation-inspired demonology,
deliberate choice of Nazism, decade of military conquest and apocalyptic
destruction.
Jeffrey Meyers published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern, 2014).
"Thomas Kemp" received another rejection:
Thank you for submitting your story to Electric Spec. Unfortunately,
your story does not meet our needs at this time. Yours is one of many
high-quality submissions we received, and we encourage you to try us
again if you have another story that you think would be a good fit.
Until the other day, I never heard of Yan Lianke. Turns out he has been a favored candidate for the Nobel. I live in Muncie, Indiana, and that could work as an excuse. Better is that I have been too busy, too lazy, too pre-occupied to keep track of these things.
So, in the midst of packing and moving and starting during lunch, I googled the writer. The attention given him seems deserved.
Yan’s
body of work includes 17 novels and more than 50 books of stories,
novellas and essays. Almost all his works are banned, officially or
unofficially, in China. A resident of Beijing, he is both celebrated and
renounced at home, even as his books – some of which are published in
Taiwan – are quietly removed from Chinese bookstores. His novels
continually change form, as if attempting to both escape and unmask the
ever-perforating realities that are contemporary China.
The plot of Hard Like Water
is straightforward: in 1968, Gao Aijun, a 26-year-old People’s
Liberation Army soldier, returns to his remote Henan home. Study
sessions in the army have purified his heart so that it is like “sheets
of paper on which one could draw something beautiful”. Arriving in
Chenggang Village, Aijun meets Hongmei, a married woman with dreams of
leading the ongoing Cultural Revolution. Aijun and Hongmei embark on a
sexual adventure fit for their epic love, an affair they believe will
propel them to orgasmic heights as well as to high-ranking positions in
the Communist party. The Cultural Revolution, entering a stage of
intra-party warfare, offers them a stage and opportunities: Aijun will
“revolutionise my way into the position of town mayor or district
commissioner”, and neither will be treated “as if we were merely made of
mud, straw, or paper”.
***
Yan’s knowledge and appropriation of revolutionary language – Mao Zedong’s poems, slogans and most famous directives, plus a heady array of literary texts, songs and propaganda from the Chinese and Soviet revolutions – is formidable. Large sections of Aijun and Hongmei’s speech are borrowed words. But Hard Like Water is neither mockery nor satire; it is a sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology. Its mashup of literary and political texts poses the uncomfortable and timely question: how did each of us arrive at our certainties? Language is wielded by Aijun sometimes as a liberatory force, sometimes as a weapon. Driven by vengeance, thirst for status and the understandable desire to “rise high in the sky”, to feel more than ordinary life permits, he and Hongmei nurture the belief that justice is enshrined in their very bodies. As they begin to control the life and death of everyone in their village, their bodies attain, through sexual ecstasy, what feels to them like the limitless yet insatiable power of the immortals. The engine of revolution is fed by bodies like theirs; for the pleasure of the engine, therefore, they are permitted everything.
In Hard Like Water, the individuals who place the basic needs of the rural poor over party dogmatism suffer the most cruel and horrifying deaths. The mass tragedy at the heart of this novel is not satirised or exaggerated; it is all too real. Early in his adventures, Aijun tries to counsel his impoverished mother: “Mother, you don’t understand revolution. Once you get on this ship, you can’t get off, because if you do, that would make you a counterrevolutionary.”
Exploring the emptiness of soldiers in the Chinese Revolution and the cost of China’s supposed progress has earned Yan Lianke, 66, the nickname “the fearless Chinese writer.” His books include Dream of Ding Village — which delves into humanity’s insatiable greed, Hard Like Water — a satire on the revolution, and Lenin’s Kisses — about the downfall of a village in the face of promises of a glorious future. He has won international awards such as the Franz Kafka Prize, been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker International Prize and is repeatedly mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Question. In the epilogue of Dream of Ding Village, you apologize to the readers for causing them pain.
Answer. In China, people were experiencing the happiness of development. Many people were unaware that others were suffering from the AIDS epidemic, which is what the book portrays. Chinese literature has long focused on the positive aspects, it has been like a hymn to the beauty of society.
Q. Why is it important to feel pain?
A. There was very little literature that paid attention to the problems we were facing. Those realities were hidden. That’s why Chinese readers found Dream of Ding Village so incredible. I wrote an epilogue apologizing for interrupting their happiness.
Q. Would you describe the literature of Chinese Nobel laureates like Gao Xingjian or Mo Yan as escapist?
***
Q. “Everyone in China was afraid: the poor were
afraid of uncertainty, and the rich were afraid of losing comfort
because they knew their money didn’t come from hard work.”
A.Those who have money fear
losing it. And those who don’t are worried about their children’s
future. There’s also a fear shared by rich and poor alike: the fear of
pesticides, the fear of the air we breathe.
Franz Kafka. Leo Tolstoy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yan Lianke?
Mandarin readers may love Yan for polemic novels like Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, and The Four Books.
English language readers might gravitate toward the first three
literary giants. What about a book by this popular Chinese novelist
about the future of realist fiction? In Discovering Fiction, Yan Lianke exegetes 19th and 20th century European and Latin American literature in order to define mythorealism — the genre he sees as the next step in China’s literary journey.
***
So, what is mythorealism? I’ll give you Yan’s
definition since I’m still a little fuzzy: “…[M]ythorealism is a
creative process that rejects the superficial logical relations that
exist in real life to explore a kind of invisible and “nonexistent”
truth…” (99). What makes this definition murky is the fact that Yan’s
just spent a great deal of time analyzing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which debuted the genre of magical realism. It’s not the same as mythorealism.
Every nation has its dark chapters and scars. But Chinese novelist
Yan Lianke noted that Korea's writers are able to face those shadows
openly.
"In China, there are certain wounds left unspoken,
something a writer cannot face,” Yan said on Thursday during a press
conference in Seoul ahead of the Seoul International Writers’ Festival,
which kicks off Friday at Ground Seoul.
“So Chinese literature is
under certain constraints. To write in China demands tremendous effort
and sacrifice," the Beijing-based novelist added.
The acclaimed
Chinese novelist, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice shortlisted
for the International Booker Prize, is known for novels sharply critical
of Chinese society — many of them banned at home.
***
“I would put ‘the truth of humanity, the truth of literature.’ A
writer’s experience, like human experience, is limited. But the truths
expressed in literature are infinite. Literature must capture the
infinite through the finite,” said Yan.
Yan Lianke wrote
My 1994 collection Summer Sunset was also banned in China,
but while this work is significant within the context of the genre of
China’s military literature and its contemporary tradition of realist
fiction, it is less significant if considered within the context of my
overall oeuvre. The broader the context, the harder it is to specify a
work’s significance. Of all my banned books, I hope that people would
read Dream of Ding Village and Lenin’s Kisses,
not those earlier works. Similarly, when people discuss me, I prefer
that they refer to me simply as an author, not as China’s most
controversial or most censored author.
My entire life, I have simply sought to produce good works and to be a
good writer, and certainly have not aspired to become China’s most
controversial and most censored author.
***
Time, age, reality, and the environment have left me feeling empty,
vain, and ponderous. I no longer assume that China’s contemporary
reality can be significantly improved, and I certainly don’t assume that
literature will be able to change that reality. Even if I can’t change
reality, at the very least I hope that reality will not change me.
Regardless of how hard I try, I’ll never be able to change reality,
although at the same time I recognize that reality is constantly
transforming me, my literature, and my literary perspective.
Virtually all my friends and colleagues praise my works from the period in the late 1990s when I wrote Streams of Time, Marrow, and The Years, Months, Days,
and they ask why I didn’t continue writing in that manner. To this I
laugh and reply, “As the saying goes, after you pass that village, you
won’t see that shop again.” Why is this so? It is because China’s
current era is no longer the one in which I wrote those works, nor is
China’s current reality the same as it was then. My reality and state of
mind have changed, and one’s writing must necessarily be grounded in
one’s current reality and state of mind. The issue is that reality has
changed me and my literature, not that my literature has created,
shaped, transformed, or maintained that reality.
***
Second, controversy and censorship are not good things, but they are
also not necessarily bad. If an author is controversial, this
demonstrates that at least he possesses integrity and magnanimity. To
the extent that some authors have integrity, we should preserve their
works. On the other hand, given that authors don’t have the ability to
alter society or reality, their works are ultimately less influential
than a single remark in an official document or a gesture by someone in
power. Given that an author’s writings cannot change reality, we must
simply ask that reality not change the author. We must try to help
ensure that the qualities of integrity and truth in the author’s works
might endure.
Third, as for an author’s ability to endure, one hopes this will not
result in the author’s becoming increasingly distanced from society, the
environment, and most readers. Sometimes persistence is not merely
persistence, but it is also an opposition to a consolidated position. I
have gradually come to understand that because you persist and don’t
want to change, you must continuously be the object of controversy. If
you persist but find that the controversy around you has stopped, that
will be because it was not you but rather society itself that has
changed. But that is such a distant eventuality! It is as difficult to
imagine as a scenario where an egg and a rock collide and the egg
remains intact while the rock shatters.
Think about it. I think he is onto something important.
Equal parts anecdotal and analytical, David’s essay explores the history of the discipline from an unapologetically personal perspective. If world literature is a chimera, perhaps it is also a dream.
I think World Literature exists because humanity shares existential qualities regardless of local specificities. It seems to me a tension exists between exoticism (such as the location and politics of, say, Orhan Pamuk's Snow) and generalities (the ethical demands of life of the individual in society and an absurd universe). That is what I will call the reader's perspective.
For writers, such as what I am trying to be, there is what I will call the dialog of technique and themes. Magical realism did not start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but he brought its techniques and themes to the forefront. The Magic Mountain shows how to bring ideas to life.
Reading the review of Blowfish (Necessary Fiction) brought to mind both aspects of world literature.
Where is the American novelist who attempts disorientation? It seems to me that our current political and social problems have us retreating into reassuring that the strangeness of existence has a Hollywood ending of security. Perhaps there are novels and novelists who are doing what is done with this novel and by this novelist. I can think of American novels that did confront the disorientation of living in a world without security: The USA Trilogy and Naked Lunch.
Toward the end of Blowfish, the unnamed thirty-something female protagonist hears a harsh truth from a friend. “You should know something,” the friend says. “You’re always thinking about yourself.” She’s right: The sculptor has spent the entirety of the novel planning, attempting, or moving on from trying to die. But apart from this preoccupation, nothing else about this book or its narrators is reliable. As soon as Jo Kyung-ran settles into a theme or conflict, she subverts it. Although it is tempting to reduce the book to a moralistic or predictable parable, its relentless disorientation does not seem accidental. It’s more a knowing tease.
As for a story's universality, what is more universal than the subjects of the "arbitrariness of life and death"?
Jo might agree that their bond is a miracle of fate. Or, more likely, she scoffs slyly at her protagonists’ need for a tidy narrative that ignores the arbitrariness of life and death. In her author’s note, Jo confesses it had never taken her so long to write a novel: “I would think about the act of writing, the meaning of it.” There is no lesson to be learned or meaning to be gleaned. Matters of life and death can be just as urgent or pointless, or both, as taking the subway or creating a sculpture. Just like her protagonist’s works, Blowfish is evidence of that physical, aimless, sometimes futile, attempt.
Engelsberg Ideas's essays always make me think, even if I do not always agree with them - such as The case for a conservative canon. I never thought the conservative claim to a more substantive moral core than liberalism was anything than a fig leave for asserting power. But when this essay started examining Nathaniel Hawthorne, I paid attention. Hawthorne is one American writer who I think is underestimated; as terrifying as Poe, a more quietly weird Melville; too conscious of passing time and moral standards.
Yes, I was one who had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school. If the essayist is correct, our reading was not butchered.
Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, embodies many of the characteristics of the conservative mind. Most English classes today, if they read the book at all, tend to butcher it – but Kirk understood it as a truly fine literary achievement. In this story of sin and shame, Hawthorne dramatised the eternal tension between the individual and society and captured his complicated relationship with his Puritan ancestors.
I have no use for his lingering Calvinism and the idea of original sin - yet predestination and original sin dominates the American culture. Which is one of several reasons I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox reject predestination for free will and see The Fall as creating a fallen world without us carrying the burden of Adam's sin.
Reading the short stories, there seemed to me a conflict between American history and ideas current at the time of their writing.
‘Hawthorne was no idolizer of the past’, Kirk wrote, ‘he knew the past to have been black and cruel, often; but for that very reason, apprehension of the past ought to be fundamental to the projecting of any social reform. Only through scrutiny of the past can society descry the limitations of human nature.’ Just as the American Republic was being engulfed by the self-interested radicalisms of antebellum politics, Hawthorne offered a warning about the hubris of moralistic extremism.
If "moralistic extremism" refers to the sides of the slavery issue, then Hawthorne's warnings were wrong. Abolition cannot be seen now or then as a self-interested radicalism. It was the very thing that conservatism claims for its justification: substantive morality.
I prefer "moralistic extremism" and self-interested radicalism referring to moral causes fronting for narrow, partisan, temporal political purposes, so that leaves Hawthorne hitting the mark. We certainly could use that kind of thinking nowadays. Our new puritans seek not to lead us to a more Christ-like life, but to our giving them control over our bodies and consciences.
In other works, from The Blithedale Romance to ‘The Birth-Mark’ and more, Hawthorne pilloried the new puritans of his time for failing to understand both the tides of history and the unchanging nature of the human person. Their senseless optimism, he knew, would not ameliorate suffering in the world – it could only cause more of it. Kirk admired this realism and noted that Hawthorne has much to teach a careful reader. ‘By heroic efforts, Hawthorne suggests, man may diminish the influence of original sin in the world; but this struggle requires nearly his undivided attention,’ he wrote, ‘Whenever man tries to ignore sin, some avenging angel intervenes, progress material and spiritual collapses, and the reality of evil is re-impressed upon men’s minds by terror and suffering. Only one species of reform really is worth attempting: reform of conscience.’ This is much-needed conservative wisdom in an age of shrill utopianism.
Returning to world literature, what is more universal than "nature of the human person"? I would add Hawthorne to that conversation.
The Sugar Kremlin,like certain strains of your work, partakes of multiple genres, multiple forms—folktales, theater or film scripts, letters, dreams, and songs—but there’s a sense that this variousness isn’t yet another postmodern reinvention of the novel so much as a waking-up-from-a-long-nightmare declaration that the novel never existed. Do you recognize this reading? What does the novel mean to you?
SOROKIN
It seems to me that the best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel. We need simply recall Gargantua and Pantagruel, Ulysses, or War and Peace. These are referred to as great novels, even though, formally speaking, it’s almost as if they weren’t novels at all. They’re simply novels that are well suited to their time, which is why they turn out to be great novels. The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure. In order to conceive of the contemporary world, I make use of complex optics, which can be referred to as faceted vision, like what insects have. Keeping in mind that, today, in post-Soviet Russia, the imperial past, which was not buried in time, presses in on the present like a glacier, the question of the future is suspended. As young Russians admit to me, “We do not feel the future as a vector of life and development.” This is an absolutely pathological situation and a writer needs a special sort of vision in order to adequately re-create this on the page (you’ll notice I say “re-create” and not “describe”). For this, I make use of a system of mirrors set up on two platforms–one is the past and one is the future. You can call this postmodernism or grotesque metarealism, I don’t mind either way. But the grotesqueness of Russian life didn’t begin with post-Soviet Russia, we need only recollect the worlds of Gogol.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you prefer the verb re-create to describe? What’s the difference? And why, when it comes to the contemporary, does recreation-on-the-page seem to be possible or at least more possible than description? Has something happened to realism or reality?
SOROKIN
I don’t like the term description of the world, it contains a clear reference to secondariness—to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds—not describe the world that’s already been created. Tolstoy, Kafka, and Joyce were able to create their own worlds, which is why their prose stuns with its intellectual authenticity.
But among your contemporaries that you do read, whom do you particularly admire?
VARGAS LLOSA
When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I’ve read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos—especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me. I have never been disappointed when I reread him, the way I have been occasionally with, say, Hemingway. I wouldn’t reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I’ve read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value. As for his essays, I find most of them to be less important, with one exception perhaps—“Saint Genet: Comedian or Martyr,” which I still like. They are full of contradictions, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and ramblings, something that never happened with Faulkner. Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand, because his technique stunned me. He was the first novelist whose work I consciously tried to reconstruct by attempting to trace, for example, the organization of time, the intersection of time and place, the breaks in the narrative, and that ability he has of telling a story from different points of view in order to create a certain ambiguity, to give it added depth. As a Latin American, I think it was very useful for me to read his books when I did because they are a precious source of descriptive techniques that are applicable to a world which, in a sense, is not so unlike the one Faulkner described. Later, of course, I read the nineteenth-century novelists with a consuming passion: Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville. I’m still an avid reader of nineteenth-century writers.
As for Latin American literature, strangely enough, it wasn’t until I lived in Europe that I really discovered it and began to read it with great enthusiasm. I had to teach it at the university in London, which was a very enriching experience because it forced me to think about Latin American literature as a whole. From then on I read Borges, whom I was somewhat familiar with, Carpentíer, Cortázar, Guimaraes Rosa, Lezama Lima—that whole generation except for García Márquez. I discovered him later and even wrote a book about him: García Márquez: Historia de un decidio. I also began reading nineteenth-century Latin American literature because I had to teach it. I realized then that we have extremely interesting writers—the novelists perhaps less so than the essayists or poets. Sarmiento, for example, who never wrote a novel, is in my opinion one of the greatest storytellers Latin America has produced; his Facundo is a masterwork. But if I were forced to choose one name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one. Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion. Our great writers have all been prolix, from Cervantes to Ortega y Gasset, Valle-Inclán, or Alfonso Reyes. Borges is the opposite—all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.
I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.
Like I suppose many people, magical realism came to me from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Joel C recommended the novel while we were both at Fort Dix FCI. Since then, I have found magical realism elsewhere. It serves as an answer to a question that came to me when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write and how to write my stories - namely, the limitation of the realist novel. Even more specifically, where does imagination and dreams and the culture into which we are immersed belong in a realistic novel? Magical realism showed me how it could fit all of those parts of us beyond the reach of the "facts only", journalistic trappings of the realistic novel. When I came to re-read Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County, I found he, too, had a few elements of magical realism. Everything had come back to Indiana, to me being fifteen years old.
From YouTube:
Why Magical Realism is a Global Phenomenon (It's Lit): provides a simple, but not simple-minded exposition of the tenets of magical realism.
The World According to Haruki Murakami: If you can resist the temptation to sleep, the presenter is so mellow, you get a tie into magical realism.
This video brings us back to Colombia, discusses the confluence of history and film, as influencing literary magical realism; it seems to me to approve of letting the weirdness all hang out, and that seems like a good idea to me:
Pardon this slight intrusion:
What is MAGICAL REALISM? Gives us a wide-ranging reading list, corresponding to my own thoughts that magical realism is not exclusive to South America (for all it is a fecund source).
I keep coming back to it as an answer to a question I came up with while in prison: how do I get into a novel the ideas that feed my imagination? Excluding imagination reduces the realistic novel to journalism. If I can look at a plot of land and see Native Americans and pioneers and escaped slaves and modern Americans intersecting, even conversing with one another, as the reality of the place, how else can I put it into a story without magical realism? I want to think of imagination as magic,
Another reading list showing the expansiveness of magical realism (and that imagination as magic is not limited to South America).
Among the many problems of prison is being sequestered from ideas and information. No Google, no Wikipedia. I would also add now no YouTube. One can have ideas and not have any idea if they are shared, if they have any validation outside one's head. These posts about writers and writing are me catching up with ideas I had in prison about writing and about the writers I did read. Salman Rushdie was one writer I finally caught up with in prison. He was also one of the first who pointed out to me that magical realism was not limited to South America. YouTube kicked this video out to me (the mysterious algorithm strikes again!), which answered a question or tow for me. It also validates my own interest in magical realism - that the truth may escape the realistic novel.
Another intrusion, but just trying to make a point here about imagination and the magic of reality:
If magical realism extends across continents and has a history before Marquez, then it is because humanity shares an imagination encompassing a sense of wonder exceeding the literal. We imagine freedom, and freedom lives on in our imaginations. Impoverish our imagination, we lose our freedom. Which is why I close out with the following from Cleveland Review of Books - Gregory Jones-Katz'sImagination is a Battlefield: Elon Musk, Techno-Fascism, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Musk’s contempt for marginal members of American society is typical of techno-fascists. Now the most prominent billionaire contributor to an international far right movement spanning the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Musk has, in so many tweets, called for a “defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the “woke campus,” and cancel culture. In March 2022, Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the left’s cancellation of J.K. Rowling. Ultimately, Musk’s fantasy to buy Hasbro is part of the global far right’s attempt to seize, remake, and control our imaginations. They act with the understanding that the kind of imagination nurtured by D&D has the potential to undermine foundational hierarchies and binaries.
What does freedom and imagination do other than undermine the clichés and restrictions of literal reality? Consider what the naked sphinx is doing in the Post Office at the start of Raintree County?
But as troubling as D&D’s past remains, the most fantastic power of D&D is precisely the one that, I believe, threatens Musk and the techno-fascist imaginary: D&D is a co-conjured stage upon which players co-imagine boundless possibilities. With an open game licensing concept implemented in 2000, which allowed independent developers to modify D&D as they saw fit, playable races and character classes have long proliferated: over 200 races and 54 base classes, in contrast to the four races and three character classes of first edition D&D. “Dark MAGA” Musk’s attachment to a foundational iteration of D&D is at one with MAGA fixations on past glories of America, such as the auto, steel, and oil industries, which, not coincidentally, were, like D&D, made in the Midwest; but D&D’s player base has, for many decades, extended far, far beyond that space to galaxies far, far away. More than all that, though, D&D “workers” not only create an imaginary world but guide its development and growth. D&D “rulebooks” are in fact guidebooks, and Gygax himself was fond of reminding players to ignore whatever rules they disliked. “Workers” could therefore change the system if they so wished. While geekdom has been appropriated by mainstream America, D&D and the imaginative play it nurtures can function like a pluralist democracy in miniature. Musk’s attempt to de-wokify the game is rooted in a dream of restricting the game’s diversified play and democratic imagination.
Fantasy and imagination that emboldens and embroiders the literal real enriches our lives.
...My students also tell me that they have completely abandoned the use of moral alignments, a categorization of the perspectives of characters. Their characters’ elaborately imagined backgrounds instead serve as the guidelines for the decisions they make, offering a freedom that I never considered when playing as a teenager. Still, my students also understand that imagination provides the possibility that myth, narrative, and metaphor might rescue humanity from the nightmare of destruction regularly justified by rationalistic claims; they unanimously expressed outrage to me about Musk’s Hasbro tweet.
And what more can any of us say that better encapsulates the purpose and effect of imagination?
We need to write; we need to imagine; we cannot let humanity be degraded any further.
